Cybershift

I believe that everything, with the exception of nothing, will soon be dependent upon cyberspace.

Face-to-face interpersonal contact will no longer be the means of meetings, business transactions, sales calls and all other similar interaction between people, businessmen and average workers and their favorite gadgets at home or at work.

In Malaysia and many other countries in Asia, the trend towards interactive TV and telephony was on the way towards greater convergence since the 1990s. Today, videolink, remote business briefings, report presentation, the podcast, highly stabilized space-to-earth com link and vice versa, data sharing, satellite communications - also known as data communications, are coming of age.

This is well and good and indicates the west is even farther ahead. Harris Corp. in the US and other companies are doggedly into nanotechnology for many applications, among them, communications. The desire to eliminate the time and space barrier in basic relations and communications is so great that man in the distant past dreamt of innovations in interpersonal talks that included talking to holograms. CNN even featured new advances in this area not too long ago. Remote meetings conducted with virtual reality technology. Things are soon to get better and better.

This is the age of the cybershift. Those that are lagging in literacy about the benefits of remote communications, remote managing, remote relations will soon find their place at the bottom of the sea. That is sad, but we really all must move on.

And moving on means not getting dragged everywhere and being enslaved by the powerful new technologies that are emerging in our midst. It means learning the ropes now but also being pro-active about it.

True, nothing can replace the experience of sensing the other person in any kind of important business confrontation, whether friendly or adversarial. However, all these one-on-one, face-to-face meetings can be planned in advance and still could be made to take place. If they are really that important and the killing is part of the agenda.

But then again, even many killings are done by remote. And so it had been since time immemorial; but it doesn't mean that conducting our affairs by remote should be tainted with the lack of sincerity, absence of integrity and purity of our intentions to make a business going.

The real test of the usefulness of remote conferencing will truly be in moving business and the affairs of nations and clusters of states wholesale, faster than used to be. What it will serve humanity in the future, especially the urgent need to communicate with just about anybody out there, in times of distress is just the icing on the cake.

Sense, Sensing, Sensual

A lover cannot do without the touch of his beau. A very love-struck young lady is sleepless after endless waiting for the feel of her love's caress.

Contact however is just a byword of ages gone by. The new realm in sensing has been replaced by remote. Volcanoes and even hurricanes normally do not make you feel they're coming. But the advent of remote sensing technology has changed all that.

The crew of a broadcast network through its communications van delivers images close to touch to the television screen into households or offices. They record or capture real-time images but though they may be are far from and not physically nor intimately in contact with the object of their coverage.

Delivery of images and sound, as almost transmitting feel, by remote was the trend and will become the norm in the days to come. Remote sensing devices, for instance that do the same as broadcast networks but with applications in other areas such as engineering, biology, chemistry, medicine, archeology, anthropology, zoology, volcanology, mapography (not a Webster's or Britannica term), photogrammetry, polarimetry, astronomy, geology, among many others deliver information to the household, to offices, science research laboratories, analyst's desks, etc. from various platforms like land transport, aircraft, spacecraft, satellite, buoys, or ships.

For this reason we are able to view portions of the crust of planet Mars (visited by NASA space probes), the surface of the moon, the Vista of Bill Gates and Apple and Linux's superb desk- and laptop screen imageries of outer space, and so many other distant objects and phenomena. According to wikipedia, a doctor is able to monitor her or his patient's pregnancy through remote ultrasound or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in the same way that by monitoring of space probes of the planets and other heavenly bodies by Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is done by NASA and other space agency experts.

Modern remote sensing relies heavily upon imaging sensor technologies. A security specialist from Malaysia who conducted a small seminar in Makati City fairly recently, said that the best remote surveillance system will always depend on the high quality of the image sensor and capture device (in simpler terms, a camera with built-in sensing-detection capability).

With the interconnectivity of many technologies, we are not far from simulating touching the very rocks of the moon that Armstrong and his fellow Apollo astronauts supposedly stepped on. We will not be far from physically viewing the contents of our personal deposits in safekeeping by trusted banks or financial custodian outfits. Observing what is happening in our offices and homes while being as far as 8,000 miles away or more than 20,000 feet above sea level in Mt. Everest or 40,000 feet on board an aircraft.

The only drawback to this technology is the high level of radiation involved. Between passive and active sensor activities, radiation is always present. It is the contention that natural radiation emissions are only those involved in the discipline of remote sensing. This is not true. Even simple mobile cellular telephones have radiation that doomsday sayers denounce as carcinogenous or causing cancer.

How scientists will bring down considerably the levels of radiation involved to levels really below the human thresholds, is a major obstacle to resolve. This will ultimately be remedied.

So, the age of remote has finally arrived. Numerous changes have been happening as advances in remote technologies are made each day, week, month and year. Before we know it, no one needs to schedule a meeting in person with a lover who is several time zones away. You can make love by remote and get to touch each other as if you were physically together. Remote sexing, as it were. Just be careful to tone down the radiation to tolerable levels... :)